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Having been born in 1982 and being the child of parents who spent most of their lives under the prospect that "The Bomb" could be dropped at any moment, my perceptions of the Eastern Block are heavily colored by that moment in time (even more so during the 1990s when the only real things you heard about the East were about economic collapse, prostitution alongside the road, war (Yugoslavia !) and crime (gangs of Romanian, Hungarian, Polish and Russian gangsters making their way here).
So, needless to say, my views of the East were (and are !) not very positive. Still: what we see here in the West is an obscene nationalism ( compared to which, our Western versions are pretty rational -- Russia and Hungary come to mind) -- while, from our perception: having nothing to be proud of with a high amount of poverty, crime, social degradation such as alcohol abuse, drug abuse and corruption and an appalling health situation (HIV was/is exploding in much of Eastern Europe). From a Western perception, their nationalism is just a plaster to keep a festering wound from erupting (in other words: from them demanding the same progress we started demanding in 1848 and an end to their almost mediaeval backwardness). Compared to them, we're very civilized. We have our problems, but we can deal with them.
Now on from the 1990s. The 2010s are an interesting period: the problems that plague the East are still there. Now what has changed ? It's the West that is slowly falling to pieces. Years of mismanagement have reduced our own living standards to not much better than they were during the 1990s. Our freedoms ? Eroded ? Our politics ? Not much better than in the East. As for the East ? They can paint a few buildings but, apart from Poland and Estonia, they are still where they used to be.
I wonder why ? Is it a social structure ? Is it the same social structure that is now pushing us down ? Or is it the fact that the Easterners had the hardcore version of the same communism, that had infested our education system, our media, our government by the late 1960s and early 1970s and that only begins to show its face now ? While the Easterners are still plagued by the same apparatchiks that had held them back for over half a century ? Questions questions.
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